You do realize that CSS3 and HTML5 are draft standards, right? Is your definition of a "decent" browser to mean one that ships with unfinished standards?

Why not? All the other serious browsers do - Firefox, Chrome, Safari. More than that, the people making those browsers are, in part, the same people making the standards - implementing those drafts allows people to actually try them out, feeding their experience back into the standards process.

I've worked with IE8 and I've had very few problems with it. I really think a lot of this IE bashing is carried over from the IE6 days.

Agreed, IE8 is a huge improvement over it's predecessors, and a fairly decent browser - it's corrected the worst of those predecessor's idiosyncrasies, and it's design seems robust.

Problem is, it's still a long way behind where it's competitors are now, and with it's long release cycles, IE doesn't evolve quickly enough to catch up. By the time IE9 is released in a year or two, it's capabilities will probably be comparable to what the other browsers do *now*. Where will those browsers be by then?